Cereal grains such as wheat, barley, oats, rye or rice are conventionally planted by either broadcasting the seeds into a plowed field, or planting them in rows spaced, for example, 6 to 8 inches apart. One conventional planting density for wheat is 11/2 bushels of seeds per acre, which corresponds, in the case of six-inch rows, to a seed spacing along the rows of about 2/3 of an inch on a center-to-center basis. For seven-inch rows, such a planting density corresponds to a spacing along the row of 0.57 inch, and for eight-inch rows such a planting density results in a spacing along the row of 1/2 inch.
Customarily, the average stooling, or sending up of additional shoots, will be between two or three shoots per plant in planting configurations of the above types.
Similarly, with broadcasting of seeds into a field, while on the average the wheat may be uniformly distributed over the field, in any particular small area, the seeds will be quite nonuniformly distributed, bunching together in one small area and being widely dispersed in another.
As a result of this, the various grasses and cereal grains are not as productive as they might otherwise be.